ATi Mobility Radeon 9700
Aquamark 3
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 Aquamark 3 |
Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8 class shaders, which led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9 class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing and then again with 4X anti-aliasing enabled. 4X Anisotropic filtering was enabled throughout. |
As expected, the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro held onto some big leads in the Aquamark 3 tests, with the Radeon 9600 XT and Mobility Radeon 9700 battling it out for second place. Once again though, the Mobility Radeon 9700 was outperformed by Radeon 9600 XT by some significant margins. At 1600x1200 with 4X anti-aliasing enabled, for example, the Radeon 9600 XT outpaced the Mobility 9700 by over 44%.
